If you’re looking to build a book library app and want to load a lot of book data, to add this feature you need to use a simple API provided by Google, and of course, it’s free. In this article, we will see the implementation of this API in our Android application.
What are we going to build in this article?
We will create a simple application where we will search for different types of books and we will be able to see the list of books related to that topic in our RecyclerView. To search for these books, we will use a free API provided by Google that contains a large collection of books. Below is a sample video to give you an idea of what we are going to do in this article. Note that we are going to implement this project using the Java language.
Step-by-Step Implementation
Step 1: Create a New Project
To create a new project in Android Studio, see How to create/start a new project in Android Studio. Note that you select Java as your programming language.
Step 2: Add the dependency for Volley in your Gradle files
Navigate to the app > Gradle Scripts > build.gradle file and add the dependency below in the dependencies section.
implementation ‘com.android.volley:volley:1.1.1’
implementation ‘com.squareup.picasso:picasso:2.71828’
After adding the dependencies below in your gradle file, now sync your project and we will now move on to our main_activity.xml file. As we will use volley to get data from our API and Picasso Image Loading Library to load images from URL.
Step 3: Add Internet Permissions
Navigate to the application > AndroidManifest.xml and add the following permissions to it .
Since we will be loading the books from the API, we need to request Internet permissions from the user. For that add the internet permissions in AndroidManifest.xml.
Step 4: Work with the activity_main.xml file
Go to the activity_main.xml file and review the following code. Below is the code for the main_activity.xml file.
Step 5 – Create a modal class to store our API data.
To create a new Modal class. Go to application > java > your application package name > right-click it and click New > Java class and name our java class as BookInfo and add below code. Comments are added in the code to know in more detail.
Step 6: Create a new layout resource file
Go to app > res > layout > right-click the > New > Layout Resource File and name the file as book_rv_item and add the following code to this file.
Step 7: Create a class of adapter to set our data to the RecyclerView element
Navigate to application > java > your application’s package name > Right-click it Click New > Java Class and name it BookAdapter and add the following code. Comments are added in the code to know in more detail.
Step 8: Create a new activity to display our book information in detail
Navigate to the java application> name of the your app package > Right-click it and click New > Activity > Select Empty Activity and name it Book Details. Make sure to select Empty Activity.
Work with the activity_book_details.xml file:
Go to the activity_book_details.xml file and see the following code. Below is the code for the activity_book_details.xml file.
Working with the BookDetails.java file:
Wow to the BookDetails.java and see the following code. Below is the code for the BookDetails.java file. Comments are added within the code to understand the code in more detail.
Step 9: Work with the MainActivity.java file
Go to MainActivity.java and see the following code. Below is the code from the MainActivity.java file. Comments are added within the code to understand the code in more detail.
Result:
See the project at the following link: https://github.com/ChaitanyaMunje/LibraryApp
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